Thwaites Brewery are one of the local ones to me, and we occasionally see their beers in Ormskirk. Ian (production manager) from Thwaites has been one of my twitter buddies for a while and he arranged for me to meet him at the Manchester Winter Ales Festival back in January. Cask Fallen Nun was the talk of the festival and so I'm chuffed to bits that he's sent through not only a bottle of that to try but also a bottle of his excellent Stone-inspired IPA: